Tracing precisely when HBO’s The Vow was filmed generally is a little complicated. The narrative is not precisely linear, bobbing between clips of individuals taking ESP programs and Mark Vicente and Bonnie Piesse voicing their suspicions about NXIVM. The latter segments can inform us a fantastic deal in regards to the venture’s timeline, nevertheless. The fact is, manufacturing for The Vow formally started in 2017 as a method of self-protection for Vicente and different NXIVM defectors, who didn’t initially got down to create a docuseries.
HBO payments The Vow as a “documentary sequence following plenty of folks deeply concerned within the self-improvement group NXIVM over the course of a number of years.” The present is directed by the Oscar-nominated couple Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer. Noujaim has a hyperlink with NXIVM — she met NXIVM official Sara Bronfman in 2008 whereas attending a convention on Richard Branson’s Necker Island. With encouragement from Bronfman and Vicente, she then took this system’s flagship course two years later. When Noujaim threw a commencement celebration with some NXIVM members, Vicente did not attend. It struck her as unusual since he had strongly inspired her to take part in NXIVM. After speaking to his spouse, Bonnie, and his enterprise companion, Sarah Edmondson, Vicente instructed Noujaim and Amer about NXIVM’s darker underbelly, together with DOS, the key society through which girls have been being branded and abused.
And so, in 2017, recording started to determine the reality about NXIVM. The documentary topics needed to protect themselves from founder Keith Raniere’s cash and energy. They feared that they might be sued by Sara Bronfman’s sister, Clare, so that they cautiously put the whole lot on tape. Vicente instructed Self-importance Truthful that he had worries about being framed. He and Edmondson knew defectors who confronted lawsuits and intimidation ways — one individual would solely contact them by way of burner telephones.
The former members struggled with whether or not or to not expose Raniere. However they lastly did — Vicente, Edmondson, and others got here to The New York Instances and helped break the story about DOS in 2017. In April 2019, HBO introduced that it had green-lit The Vow, which would come with the footage that the previous members recorded. At that time, Raniere and his co-conspirators had been arrested. By the center of the identical 12 months, the ladies deeply concerned within the group had taken plea offers, and Raniere himself was discovered responsible.
